Very near the top of the rankings is an institutional battle over the bid by the EU’s diplomatic service to gain full authority over envoys despatched to the world’s most troubled regions.

That battle has now claimed its biggest casualty yet: the envoy to the Middle East peace process. When the current appointee, Andreas Reinicke, completes his mandate on 31 December, the position – the oldest and most high-profile of the envoy posts – will be abolished.

The decision was made by Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, in the face of fierce opposition from the member states. She has not explained her decision. The EU diplomatic service that she heads, the EEAS, has merely pointed to Ashton’s review of the functioning of the service, published in July. In that review, she argued, with little elaboration, that in light of the Lisbon treaty, the “current status of EUSR is an anomaly” and that the current institutional ties – “a relationship primarily to the member states” – should be transformed. The answer: make them “an intrinsic part of the EEAS”.

Why the change?

So what is it about the envoys’ relationship with the member states that has prompted Ashton to defy all 28 member states?

Member states created the role of roving EU special representatives (EUSRs) in 1996. They chose the envoys, and they gave them support staff.

That changed a little, in 2009, when the Lisbon treaty created the EEAS and gave the EU’s foreign policy chief the sole right to create an envoy post and to nominate the envoy; the member states merely approve the post and the nominee. The full potential of that formulation became apparent when Ashton abolished the Middle East post: member states have no remedy in law if the foreign policy chief decides a post should disappear.

But it is not the legal power to create or abolish posts that has absorbed so many hours of top diplomats’ time. The battlefield is control of finances.

If the envoy were paid out of the EEAS’s budget, as Ashton wants, the member states would not have the right to approve nominees for envoy positions.

The member states’ approval is built into a contract that sets out that, as before 2009, the Commission pays the envoy, his expenses andnon-seconded staff. When the EEAS was formed, it gained its own institutional budget, but much of the EU’s budget for external affairs – the budget for a ‘common foreign and security policy’, including the ‘foreign-policy instruments’ (FPI) that paid for envoys – remained under the control of the Commission.

The overarching rationale for the Commission’s continuing influence was that the Commission carries out many of the EU’s foreign activities. By the same logic, Ashton is both the head of the EEAS and a vice-president of the Commission, and the Commission officials who oversee the foreign-policy instruments are housed in the EEAS.

The logic of the Commission’s control of the ‘common foreign and security policy’ budget is not challenged by Ashton in her review of the EEAS: “it is not possible to integrate the activities of the FPI fully into the EEAS”, she wrote. She makes an exception, though, for the special envoys.

Her argument, insofar as she reveals it, relates to institutional authority over envoys.

But the strife is far more than an institutional turf war; it is about how the war is being waged and why the turf – the value of roving diplomats in trouble-spots – is important.

The member states say that the results of an ongoing review of EEAS should not be prejudged. They believe that it is being prejudged: their budget experts have seen envoys appearing in the EEAS budget. They view Ashton’s decision to kill off the post of Middle East envoy as a nuclear option. They want assurances that, if the EEAS gains control over the budget for envoys, it would retain the posts, rather than use the money on other things. They say the EEAS is not providing those assurances – and that the abolition of the Middle East post speaks louder than words.

The value that member states see in envoys is evident in their enumeration of the possible effects of the loss of the Middle East envoy: a sharp reduction in face-to-face informal contacts with the region’s most important players, a loss of top-level intelligence; and the sidelining of the EU in a peace process in which many member states already believe they are marginal and marginalised.

The struggle over envoys is therefore in large part a battle over the type of diplomacy needed to untie the world’s knottiest problems.

For the EEAS, the envoys should serve one master. For member states, the absorption of envoys into the EEAS – and the possible disappearance of the remaining ten – stokes fears of a bureaucratisation of diplomacy, a triumph of Commission types in the EEAS over career diplomats.